Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

From:

Karl Berry

Subject:

Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

Date:

Fri, 4 Oct 2002 11:57:38 -0400

Hi Janis,
Are there plans to have makeinfo generate html that conforms to XHTML
1.0 Transitional?
Since yours was the first report of this, so no, it hasn't been on my
list :).
In general, I'm a lot more interested in doing things that help users
than in conforming to standards purely for the sake of conforming to
standards. Since so many people use older browsers, we can't take
advantage of any new features in the standards (whatever they might be).
We've tried to make makeinfo's html output look ok in a wide variety of
browsers -- basically just requiring <table> support.
So, while it'd be fine to do this, it's not something I can spend a lot
of time on -- and some of those changes would require a lot of work. It
is not necessarily apparent to me where to insert a </p>, or even an
<li>, for example. It would be hard to program, especially with the
current makeinfo source.
On the other hand, quoting <meta> attributes shouldn't be a problem.
The other changes probably fall somewhere in between.
A couple specific questions ...
the end tag for @samp{<meta>} is omitted
I was under the impression that no </meta> was necessary.
an @samp{<hr>} tag should be emitted as @samp{<hr />}
Won't that break older browsers? Maybe <hr></hr> would be more compatible.
@html
<hr>
<p>
@end html
I'm not entirely sure what you meant this fragment to illustrate.
Within @html ... @end html, makeinfo is not going to interpret anything
-- that would defeat the purpose of the feature. It should just output
whatever is there, as-is.
Overall, if you feel it's important to claim conformance to this
standard, I'm afraid you'll have to postprocess the makeinfo output for
the foreseeable future. Sorry.
Thanks for the report,
karl